Apple v. Samsung Closes Week Two, the Patent Expert Parade

Apple and Samsung continue to duke it out in federal court over copyright infringement relating to products like the iPad, left, and the Galaxy Tab, right. Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired

The second week in Apple v. Samsung saw a parade of expert witnesses describing the patents at issue in the case. Although the tedious breakdown of each patent could be considered dry, a few interesting nuggets of information emerged both in the courtroom, and in unsealed court filings.

On the “confusion” front — Apple’s claim that consumers get confused by the similarities between Samsung’s products and Apple’s — survey researcher and professional litigation expert Kent Van Liere took the stand briefly. He’d conducted a mix of web surveys and “mall-intercept” surveys where he showed mall-goers videos of the unbranded front and side of the devices, and he testified that 52 percent of people surveyed associated Samsung’s Fascinate smartphone with Apple, and 51 percent associated the Galaxy S II Epic 4G with the iPhone.

User interface expert Ravin Balakrishnan detailed the so-called bounceback feature of Apple’s UI, using Powerpoint stacks and animations to help keep jurors from nodding off. He argued that Samsung infringed on Apple’s bounceback patent (the ‘381 patent) and that they did so knowingly: They knew how Apple solved the document-scrolling issue, and simply decided to use Apple’s method rather than creating its own, he claimed.

Unsealed court documents this week also revealed exact sales figures for Samsung’s and Apple’s smartphones and tablets involved in the case.

Back in January 2011, Samsung reported the company sold 2 million Galaxy Tabs. It looks like that figure wasn’t quite true — the number is in fact closer to a tenth of that, 262,000 units in Q4 of 2010, and another 77,000 more the following quarter. And for the second quarter of this year, Samsung also reported sales of over 2 million tablets, when in fact the company only sold 37,000 tablets. That brings the total tablets Samsung has sold to around 1.4 million. Ouch.

Samsung’s smartphone sales figures fare much better, with the Galaxy Prevail and Epic 4G bringing in the most units sold: 2.25 million and 1.89 million, respectively. From June 2010 to June 2012, Samsung sold a total of 21.25 million phones, accumulating over $7.5 billion in revenue.

Since their respective launches, Apple on the other hand has sold 85 million iPhones and 34 million iPads, and in the first two quarters of 2012, over 19 million iPhones and over 10 million iPads have been sold. That’s $50 billion in iPhone revenue and $19 billion in iPad revenue for the Cupertino company.

Last week we saw illuminating testimony from Apple executives Phil Schiller and Scott Forstall on the origins of the iPhone, iPad, and the iOS user interface. And former Apple design guru Susan Kare stepped in earlier this week to provide her expert take on some of the UI issues at hand.

Friday marks the sixth day of the jury trial in San Jose federal court. Apple’s counsel said that it expects to wrap up its case by Monday at the latest, then Samsung will begin its defense. After that, the “Samsung v. Apple” portion of the trial will begin over Apple’s alleged infringement of Samsung’s 3G-related patents.